About that “moderate” new Iranian president

**Posted by Phineas

“Moderate” in post-Khomeini Iranian dictionaries must meanΒ “Cool with blowing up Jews in foreign countries:”

Iranian President-elect Hassan Rowhani was on the special Iranian government committee that plotted the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, according to an indictment by the Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case.

The AMIA bombing is considered the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history, killing 85 and wounding hundreds more. The Argentine government had accused the Iranian government of planning the attack and Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah of carrying it out. Numerous former and current Iranian officials are wanted by Interpol in connection with the bombing.

Former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi, who defected from Iran in the late 1990s, testified that the decision to launch the attack was made within a special operations committee connected to the powerful Supreme National Security Council in August 1993.

According to the 2006 indictment, Mesbahi testified that Rowhani, who was then serving as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, was also a member of the special committee when it approved the AMIA bombing.

A committee that included Supreme Leader (1) Ali Khamenei, the hardliner’s hardliner and real ruler of Iran. If Rowhani didn’t meet his approval, Khamenei wouldn’t have allowed him on the committee, nor would he have allowed him to run for president this year.

What? You didn’t know that Khamenei, ostensibly through the clericalΒ Guardian Council, picks who’s even allowed to run for president in the first place?

That’s why referring to this guy as a “moderate” is nothing more than a bad joke. If he had been a genuine moderate, interested in improving relations in the world, ending Iranian state support for terrorism, and reining in Khamenei’s beloved nuclear program, the “Supreme Leader” and the Guardian Council would never have let him run in the first place. If he’s a moderate, it’s in the same way Rudolf Hess was a “moderate Nazi.”

What’s disheartening is to see again just how desperate many in the West are to find a moderate Iranian leader, someone with whom we can cut a deal. (See, for example,Β this pieceΒ in the leftist GuardianΒ and thisΒ in the nearly-as-leftist New York Times) They’re nothing more than the spiritual grandchildren of the fools and appeasers who thought one could deal with Hitler.

The plan fact is that Iran has been at war with the United States and on a mission from Allah to destroy Israel and kill Jews since 1979. The people in charge, quite possibly including Rowhani, see it as their mission to bring about the Islamic “end times.” They have been stringing the US and the West along for decades, dissembling and dissimulating and pretending to be reasonable enough that they can always find suckers (including each new American administration from Carter to Obama) who think they’ll be the one to strike the “Grand Bargain.”

And I bet it will turn out the same way with Rowhani Β and Obama, only the ending here will not just be egg on an American president’s face, but Khamenei in possession of a nuclear bomb.

PS: Michael Ledeen has written a great book on the difficulty the West has calling evil for what it is and facing it directly until great damage has been done and it’s almost too late. By our willful blindness and failure to take meaningful steps early, we becomeΒ “Accomplices to Evil.”Β Highly recommended.

Footnote:
(1) One sign of possible Fascist infestation — a liking for grandiose, ego-stroking titles.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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